Hello, my lovelies! I know, I know, I've been neglecting you like you were a three-month old strapped in a car seat and I'm "weekend daddy" with a fistful of ones and a free cover coupon to the local titty bar. It's been a very busy couple of weeks, and I refuse to apologize for having so much fun in real life that I don't have time to cuss and rant on teh Webs.
This past weekend we visited my miraculously-recovered mom, scared off her stalker neighbor, and got her righteously high. All-around good times, especially if you've ever seen my mom stoned. Fucking hilarious. Better than putting a sock on a cat's head, I tell you.Too bad it's a damned three-hour drive between where I live now and where I grew up, because when we got home we were both too tired to cook and absolutely sick of fast food. Enter God's gift to lazy fucks with no desire to eat three Big Macs in two days: the grocery-store rotisserie chicken.
Cheap as hell, and pretty okay, for the money. I still prefer my roasted chicken (clean out the gizzard package, unless you've bought a delicious air-frozen chicken which I love but boycott just the same because they don't include the neck and heart and liver and gizzards, and THAT'S JUST NOT RIGHT--and stuff the cavity with onions and garlic, after you've rubbed the whole damned thing inside and out with salt and pepper and maybe a little thyme and rosemary if you're feeling particularly ambitious, throw it in a roasting pan, surround it with carrots and potatoes, and cook at 350 for about 2 hours), but when I'm wallowing in salt-induced edema and lethargy, rotisserie chickens and a bag of salad feed my family without making me feel like a COMPLETE white-trash slut.
And the great thing is, whether your chicken is roasted at the store or in your oven, after you're done picking through it for a meal, you've still got plenty of trash meat and a nice juicy carcass, perfect for one of my top-ten all-time-favorite foods, CHICKEN MOTHERFUCKING POT PIE.
And here's the irony--I don't like pie. Not the fruity kind, not the nutty kind, not the custardy kind. But then, I don't like sweet things as a general rule. Give me Slim Jims over Twinkies any day. I much prefer salt and grease to sugar and flour. Here's more irony--my cholesterol and blood pressure are fine, but I'm a borderline diabetic. FML.
But you put some meat and gravy and mushy peas inside that pie pastry, and I'm all over it like a frat boy on a preacher's daughter during Rush Week. I get OBSCENE with the moaning and the eye-rolling and the touching myself under the table and . . . um, what? Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.
Anyway. I do pot pies with leftover lamb and steak, as well. Not so much with pork. I don't know why, but it probably has something to do with the fact that we package our pork chops after cutting them from super-cheap loins so that we don't really *have* leftovers, but sometimes a steak is just TOO MUCH, or it's Easter and we get sent home with the better part of a roast leg of lamb. The only difference with chicken is that I have the carcass to make my own stock with.
For stock, what you want to do is dig your hands in and pull every single shred of viable meat off that bastard, and set it aside. Take all those poor bedraggled bones and bits of cartilage and skin and fat, throw them in a pot with a few bay leaves, some roughly-chopped carrots, onions, and celery, and simmer it for most of a day. Strain it, and reduce it till you've only got about two cups left. This will be your gravy later, so don't fuck it up, because fucking up gravy is punishable by six months spent watching "Family Matters" re-runs, all the Erkel-heavy episodes, or at least it will be once I cash in on a few life insurance policies and hire those mercenaries I've been daydreaming about.
Once you've got the stock strained, but before you reduce it, go ahead and peel two carrots and two small-ish potatoes, cut them up into fairly small chunks, and boil them in that stock until soft Just before they're done, add some frozen peas. Dip them out with a slotted spoon and add them to the chicken.
Anyway, for a good potpie, you need a seriously kick-ass pastry crust. I don't even LIKE pie crust, and I LOVE this shit.
Sift or mix with a fork:
2 cups flour
1 tsp salt
Cut in
1 cup shortening
until the lumps are about pea-sized
Mix in
1/2 cup VERY cold water. Form into 2 lumps, wrap in plastic, stick in the fridge for at least 3-4 hours, or up to 2 days.
The trick with pastry dough is to A) not melt the fat until it's baked, and B) don't over-work it. With breads you want to beat and knead the crap out of your flour until it rolls over and forms strand-y proteins; with pastry you want it to remain all aloof and shit so that the un-melted fat will cook it where its snooty layers lie so that the end result flakes off like your freshman-year college girlfriend when she discovered mushrooms and Phish, and also melts in your mouth like that very same girlfriend.
When rolled out nice and thin, this will provide enough dough for two delicious layers of flaky, toe-curling pastry, plus two sheets of pie crust cookies (take the scraps, put them on a couple of greased cookie sheets, sprinkle with cinnamon and sugar, and bake at 350).
So when you've got your stock all nice and reduced, you can NOW salt and pepper it. Do not, I repeat, DO NOT salt before reducing. You'll be sorry if you do.
In your cast-iron skillet (and if you don't have one, go ahead and kick yourself in the nuts, because you have no business cooking) melt two tablespoons of butter (or some sort of vegetable oil if you're a big weeping vagina or have had bypass surgery) over medium heat. Whisk in two tablespoons of flour, and KEEP WHISKING until it turns sort of light-brown and smells more like nuts than wallpaper paste. This is called a ROUX, and you'd damned well better remember it, because it's pure awesome and the basis of most delicious cooking.
When you've got your roux nice and light-to-medium brown, start whisking in the chicken stock. When it's medium-thin-thick, go ahead and pour it in the bowl with the big chicken-pea-carrot-potato mess. You might want to add a little extra chicken stock, or hold back on the gravy. What you're going for is a nice, sticky, glompy mess that's not too dry and not runny.
Stuff that shit into your pie crust, cover it with the second crust, cut some slits to vent, and bake it for about an hour at 350. You'll want to start out with the edges covered in foil, or they're going to get all sorts of burnt and nasty.
And this is how you make your inner critic shut the fuck up about being a lousy housewife for spending seven bucks on a rotisserie chicken. My therapist says that my inner voices are too Midwestern for my own good. I say that nobody will prescribe me the *really* good drugs to shut them up, so I have to make do with fatty fatty gravy-soaked food, so whose fault is it that I'm fat? The psychiatric community's, that's who.
Friday, March 4, 2011
Friday, February 11, 2011
On Mental Health And Cinnamon Rolls
Woo, so here it is, Friday night and I'm drunk and posting. Get used to it, this is my pattern.
Spent the evening in a catfight with this lovely little drama queen back east. Bitch thinks that it doesn't matter how lovely his mood is, how amazingly wonderful his evening may go, some stupid whore on the bus can ruin it for him just by being fat and scratching her leg the wrong way, that some asshole in line in the grocery store can speak in the wrong tone of voice and then WHOOSH!!! There goes that wonderful state of mind, gone forever, can't recall it, and it's all THAT STUPID ASSHOLE'S fault.
Sorry, I hold a different opinion. We are each responsible for our own state of mind. If I am in a wonderful mood and you are my checker at the grocery store and spend our entire encounter scowling, sneering, and snorting loogeys back into your own hateful face, that's YOUR fucking problem, not mine. If I fail to smile at you and make a joke about boogers, then that means I need to double my dose of anti-depressants and/or get out more.
I FUCKING CHOOSE to respond to you in a pleasant or unpleasant manner, no matter what sort of assholery you present to me. This is a lesson I have learned the MOTHERFUCKING HARD WAY, through years and years of cognitive behavioral therapy and customer service work. It is not YOUR choice as to whether your manner elicits a happy or unhappy mood in me. This may be an extreme reaction to having been beaten, raped, whored out, and generally abused during a few ill-advised careers in my youth, but this is how I've learned to live with what I've done and what I've allowed to be done to me: how you act towards me is not anything that I can control. How I choose to react to your behavior, however, is completely within MY realm of control, and YOU CAN'T TOUCH IT.
So go ahead. Cut me off just before my exit. Shovel your snow onto my walk. Tell me on teh Interwebs that I'm a stupid asshole for having an opinion. You can't make me not smile at you. You can't say I can't laugh at you. You can't make me take you seriously. You can't MAKE me angry at you. You control your actions, and I mine, but I know a secret: I also control my REactions. I bet you haven't had a stint in rehab or crisis counseling to learn THAT little fact of life.
And what the ever-loving hell does any of this have to do with food? Not a damn thing, really. Except that I'm exploiting this blog to divulge a lot more than just recipes.
Except I feel it necessary to give you people SOME sort of nutritional guidance. Shit, if I were to believe my Facebook feed, you all live on nothing but tacos and vodka.
So to make a VERY loose connection between the most generic piece of all-over life-coaching advice I have to give ANYBODY, which is GET OVER YOURSELF, YOU STUPID SELFISH ASSHOLE. EVERYONE HAS PROBLEMS. MAKE SURE THAT YOU'RE NOT ONE OF THEIRS AND THEY'RE NOT ONE OF YOURS, is giving all of you sad saps the Holy Fucking Grail of yeast bread recipes.
Now, I'm not a purist. I like my sourdough all sorts of sour and unpredictable; I like my whiskey cheap; I like my challah eggy and dirty, and I like my whores Puerto Rican and a little scared and I mean what now? Oh. Bread. Yeah.
When you go looking for the *good* recipes, the recipes your withered-up grandma knew by heart, the recipes some terrified Sicillian immigrant got as a bridal shower gift back in '53, they're all so damned SPECIFIC. This is your dinner roll recipe, and this is your cinnamon roll recipe, and this is your bierock recipe, and what are you doing marrying a filthy kike/kraut/wop anyway, you dirty whore?
Um, anyway, the ladies who came before us bore up under A LOT of bullshit that even the meekest of us would call the hotline about. WOULDN'T WE?
Myself, I've played around with yeast breads since I was maybe 10 or so, and what I've learned is that mostly, bread recipes are the same. They want to be treated just right, kneaded up until *just* the right point, and then left the hell alone. Whatever you do with them after that is up to you.
This, my friends, is my all-purpose, go-to, anything-you-want yeast bread recipe. Ball it up into bits and it's dinner rolls. Roll it out and stuff it full of butter and cinnamon and sugar and it's cinnamon rolls. Roll it out thinner and stuff it full of meat and/or what-have-you and it's kick-ass bierocks. Any way you roll it or smoosh it, it's really, really hard to fuck up. which is, I guess, what makes it my favorite metaphor for the female Midwestern spirit. Even a beginner or ham-handed hard-hearted asshole who knows better is going to have a hard time fucking this up. Cheers, ladies, and chins up.
Basic Dough
4 1/2 tsp. yeast
1/2 C warm water
2 C warm milk
6 TBLSP shortening
2 eggs
1/4 C sugar
1 1/2 tsp. salt
7-8 C flour
Proof the first two together. Cream the next two together, too. Add the eggs, and sugar, and the rest. Add enough flour to turn out onto floured surface and knead 'till sticky and elastic. Cover and let rise 'till doubled, about an hour. Divide into rolls or whatever, let rise again. Bake at 350.
This can be easily halved, or doubled. All the best recipes are.
Now go make some cinnamon rolls for your fat cousin, or surprise your skinny-ass momma with some dinner rolls. But if I ever even ONCE catch one of you bitching about how this stupid anorexic WHORE made you feel all FAT because she gave you THAT LOOK while she ate her salad, I will not hesitate to call you out on your issues.
That is all. Go make bread, eat it, be happy. So proclaimeth THE CHUBBY DRUNK!!!
Spent the evening in a catfight with this lovely little drama queen back east. Bitch thinks that it doesn't matter how lovely his mood is, how amazingly wonderful his evening may go, some stupid whore on the bus can ruin it for him just by being fat and scratching her leg the wrong way, that some asshole in line in the grocery store can speak in the wrong tone of voice and then WHOOSH!!! There goes that wonderful state of mind, gone forever, can't recall it, and it's all THAT STUPID ASSHOLE'S fault.
Sorry, I hold a different opinion. We are each responsible for our own state of mind. If I am in a wonderful mood and you are my checker at the grocery store and spend our entire encounter scowling, sneering, and snorting loogeys back into your own hateful face, that's YOUR fucking problem, not mine. If I fail to smile at you and make a joke about boogers, then that means I need to double my dose of anti-depressants and/or get out more.
I FUCKING CHOOSE to respond to you in a pleasant or unpleasant manner, no matter what sort of assholery you present to me. This is a lesson I have learned the MOTHERFUCKING HARD WAY, through years and years of cognitive behavioral therapy and customer service work. It is not YOUR choice as to whether your manner elicits a happy or unhappy mood in me. This may be an extreme reaction to having been beaten, raped, whored out, and generally abused during a few ill-advised careers in my youth, but this is how I've learned to live with what I've done and what I've allowed to be done to me: how you act towards me is not anything that I can control. How I choose to react to your behavior, however, is completely within MY realm of control, and YOU CAN'T TOUCH IT.
So go ahead. Cut me off just before my exit. Shovel your snow onto my walk. Tell me on teh Interwebs that I'm a stupid asshole for having an opinion. You can't make me not smile at you. You can't say I can't laugh at you. You can't make me take you seriously. You can't MAKE me angry at you. You control your actions, and I mine, but I know a secret: I also control my REactions. I bet you haven't had a stint in rehab or crisis counseling to learn THAT little fact of life.
And what the ever-loving hell does any of this have to do with food? Not a damn thing, really. Except that I'm exploiting this blog to divulge a lot more than just recipes.
Except I feel it necessary to give you people SOME sort of nutritional guidance. Shit, if I were to believe my Facebook feed, you all live on nothing but tacos and vodka.
So to make a VERY loose connection between the most generic piece of all-over life-coaching advice I have to give ANYBODY, which is GET OVER YOURSELF, YOU STUPID SELFISH ASSHOLE. EVERYONE HAS PROBLEMS. MAKE SURE THAT YOU'RE NOT ONE OF THEIRS AND THEY'RE NOT ONE OF YOURS, is giving all of you sad saps the Holy Fucking Grail of yeast bread recipes.
Now, I'm not a purist. I like my sourdough all sorts of sour and unpredictable; I like my whiskey cheap; I like my challah eggy and dirty, and I like my whores Puerto Rican and a little scared and I mean what now? Oh. Bread. Yeah.
When you go looking for the *good* recipes, the recipes your withered-up grandma knew by heart, the recipes some terrified Sicillian immigrant got as a bridal shower gift back in '53, they're all so damned SPECIFIC. This is your dinner roll recipe, and this is your cinnamon roll recipe, and this is your bierock recipe, and what are you doing marrying a filthy kike/kraut/wop anyway, you dirty whore?
Um, anyway, the ladies who came before us bore up under A LOT of bullshit that even the meekest of us would call the hotline about. WOULDN'T WE?
Myself, I've played around with yeast breads since I was maybe 10 or so, and what I've learned is that mostly, bread recipes are the same. They want to be treated just right, kneaded up until *just* the right point, and then left the hell alone. Whatever you do with them after that is up to you.
This, my friends, is my all-purpose, go-to, anything-you-want yeast bread recipe. Ball it up into bits and it's dinner rolls. Roll it out and stuff it full of butter and cinnamon and sugar and it's cinnamon rolls. Roll it out thinner and stuff it full of meat and/or what-have-you and it's kick-ass bierocks. Any way you roll it or smoosh it, it's really, really hard to fuck up. which is, I guess, what makes it my favorite metaphor for the female Midwestern spirit. Even a beginner or ham-handed hard-hearted asshole who knows better is going to have a hard time fucking this up. Cheers, ladies, and chins up.
Basic Dough
4 1/2 tsp. yeast
1/2 C warm water
2 C warm milk
6 TBLSP shortening
2 eggs
1/4 C sugar
1 1/2 tsp. salt
7-8 C flour
Proof the first two together. Cream the next two together, too. Add the eggs, and sugar, and the rest. Add enough flour to turn out onto floured surface and knead 'till sticky and elastic. Cover and let rise 'till doubled, about an hour. Divide into rolls or whatever, let rise again. Bake at 350.
This can be easily halved, or doubled. All the best recipes are.
Now go make some cinnamon rolls for your fat cousin, or surprise your skinny-ass momma with some dinner rolls. But if I ever even ONCE catch one of you bitching about how this stupid anorexic WHORE made you feel all FAT because she gave you THAT LOOK while she ate her salad, I will not hesitate to call you out on your issues.
That is all. Go make bread, eat it, be happy. So proclaimeth THE CHUBBY DRUNK!!!
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Oooh! My First Critique!!!
Some lady my MIL's boyfriend is acquainted with called me "mildly amusing, profane, and completely full of herself."
Fuckin' A!!!
First off, my goal is to be amusing. Even "mildly" so, by a woman's estimation. Because truth is, we modern Western women are utter bitches, so for one of us to admit that another is "not UTTERLY fugly" or "mildly amusing" is damn near a Nobel Prize For Awesomeness.
Because we've been raised in this totally fucked-up culture that leads us to believe that the more pedestrian, the more mundane, the tackier, the more promiscuous, uglier, stupider, and fatter we can declare that OTHER bitch to be, this automatically elevates us to the level of prettier, thinner, smarter, wittier, more refined, more tasteful, and tighter of cunt.
Well, fuck that with a rake. I refuse to participate. It does not actually violate ANY laws of time or space if more than one of us vagina-bearers is, at any given time, equally smart, or witty, or pretty, or sexy, or orgasmy-inducingly-tongue-talented. COMPETITION IS FOR THOSE STUPID TWATS WHO THINK PAGEANTS ARE FUN. REAL LIFE IS SUPPOSED TO BE FUN FOR THE REST OF US, GETTING DRUNK IN THE HOTEL BAR WITH THE FLAMINGLY GAY PAGEANT "JUDGES."
So if anyone out there in reader-land is just burning with desire to tell me how arrogant, how self-centered, how utterly cunt-tastic I am because I adopt an online persona of fabulous confidence and self-assured-ness, then I cordially invite you to DIP MY COCK IN CHOCOLATE AND THEN SUCK IT TILL YOU'RE BLUE IN THE FACE, YOU JEALOUS BITCH. And that's damn near as diplomatic as I care to phrase my opinion, DARLIN'.
PS--My six-year-old daughter is in first grade, surrounded by girls who are probably the daughters of insecure ladies like yourself, who tell her that "only babies don't have boyfriends," and "those jeans make your butt look big." My daughter? She's the one saying "Wow! I'm awesome! Look, here's how you do that, now you're awesome, too!!" So who's fucking it up by being all egotistical and shit, BITCH???
Fuckin' A!!!
First off, my goal is to be amusing. Even "mildly" so, by a woman's estimation. Because truth is, we modern Western women are utter bitches, so for one of us to admit that another is "not UTTERLY fugly" or "mildly amusing" is damn near a Nobel Prize For Awesomeness.
Because we've been raised in this totally fucked-up culture that leads us to believe that the more pedestrian, the more mundane, the tackier, the more promiscuous, uglier, stupider, and fatter we can declare that OTHER bitch to be, this automatically elevates us to the level of prettier, thinner, smarter, wittier, more refined, more tasteful, and tighter of cunt.
Well, fuck that with a rake. I refuse to participate. It does not actually violate ANY laws of time or space if more than one of us vagina-bearers is, at any given time, equally smart, or witty, or pretty, or sexy, or orgasmy-inducingly-tongue-talented. COMPETITION IS FOR THOSE STUPID TWATS WHO THINK PAGEANTS ARE FUN. REAL LIFE IS SUPPOSED TO BE FUN FOR THE REST OF US, GETTING DRUNK IN THE HOTEL BAR WITH THE FLAMINGLY GAY PAGEANT "JUDGES."
So if anyone out there in reader-land is just burning with desire to tell me how arrogant, how self-centered, how utterly cunt-tastic I am because I adopt an online persona of fabulous confidence and self-assured-ness, then I cordially invite you to DIP MY COCK IN CHOCOLATE AND THEN SUCK IT TILL YOU'RE BLUE IN THE FACE, YOU JEALOUS BITCH. And that's damn near as diplomatic as I care to phrase my opinion, DARLIN'.
PS--My six-year-old daughter is in first grade, surrounded by girls who are probably the daughters of insecure ladies like yourself, who tell her that "only babies don't have boyfriends," and "those jeans make your butt look big." My daughter? She's the one saying "Wow! I'm awesome! Look, here's how you do that, now you're awesome, too!!" So who's fucking it up by being all egotistical and shit, BITCH???
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Just In Case You Were Wondering . . .
. . . about this blog's brilliant and witty author, here's a bit about me.
First off, I'm a tad bit narcissistic. No one but us self-absorbed types ever pen an "about me" section, FYI.
I don't work. I do the homemaker thing, staying at home to take care of my almost-two-year-old and her ancient creaking first-grader of a big sister. My husband works in IT for a union, which is a fancy way of saying that he fixes menopausal ladies' Outlook problems when he's not busy keeping hundreds of thousands of folks' vital information out of the hands of filthy dirty hackers. It also means he gets shit pay but *great* benefits, which is a huge plus for a hysterical hypochondriac like myself.
I say I don't work, but that's kind of a lie. My day starts at 6 AM when the baby starts flinging formula into my face (that's how she says GOOD MORNING, MOMMY! TODAY WE SHALL BE HYPER AND ANNOYING AND TEAR SHIT UP! I swear, it's like I have my own 28-pound punk band in a crib) and doesn't end until sometime after 8 in the evening when all the dishes are washed and the floors are swept and the laundry is clean and folded and bottle refills have been delivered and lullabyes have been sung and teeth have been brushed and husbands have been laid.
But dinnertime? It's pretty much the highlight of my day. All of these people whom I clothe and bathe and keep from wallowing in abject filth sit around the same table and eat what I've cooked and listen to what I say and the whole experience makes me feel like a halfway sane grownup for about ten minutes before the baby starts pushing the table into her sister's chest and the oldest spits out whatever vegetable I've cooked and I go back to wanting to drink nine pints of whiskey and light something on fire.
So this is why I blog about food. That, and the fact that I'm a REALLY FUCKING GOOD COOK, and also very funny and smarter than you. The Internet needs more people like me. We could almost compensate for Gawker.
First off, I'm a tad bit narcissistic. No one but us self-absorbed types ever pen an "about me" section, FYI.
I don't work. I do the homemaker thing, staying at home to take care of my almost-two-year-old and her ancient creaking first-grader of a big sister. My husband works in IT for a union, which is a fancy way of saying that he fixes menopausal ladies' Outlook problems when he's not busy keeping hundreds of thousands of folks' vital information out of the hands of filthy dirty hackers. It also means he gets shit pay but *great* benefits, which is a huge plus for a hysterical hypochondriac like myself.
I say I don't work, but that's kind of a lie. My day starts at 6 AM when the baby starts flinging formula into my face (that's how she says GOOD MORNING, MOMMY! TODAY WE SHALL BE HYPER AND ANNOYING AND TEAR SHIT UP! I swear, it's like I have my own 28-pound punk band in a crib) and doesn't end until sometime after 8 in the evening when all the dishes are washed and the floors are swept and the laundry is clean and folded and bottle refills have been delivered and lullabyes have been sung and teeth have been brushed and husbands have been laid.
But dinnertime? It's pretty much the highlight of my day. All of these people whom I clothe and bathe and keep from wallowing in abject filth sit around the same table and eat what I've cooked and listen to what I say and the whole experience makes me feel like a halfway sane grownup for about ten minutes before the baby starts pushing the table into her sister's chest and the oldest spits out whatever vegetable I've cooked and I go back to wanting to drink nine pints of whiskey and light something on fire.
So this is why I blog about food. That, and the fact that I'm a REALLY FUCKING GOOD COOK, and also very funny and smarter than you. The Internet needs more people like me. We could almost compensate for Gawker.
Saturday, January 29, 2011
What's Spanish For "Goddamned Delicious?"
If I had to guess, I'd say "tacos al pastor."
Events are conspiring in your favor, my friends. Yesterday was both the first time I've had the delicacy known as pastor, a sweet-and-spicy pineapple-marinaded slow-roasted pork, as well as the first warm-ish sunny day we've had in ninety-three million YEARS. It put me in mind of oh-so-Midwestern Cinco De Mayo celebrations, where all we pasty-assed Kansans congregate and consume way too much cheap tequila and bland burritos and bitch about them damn furrners takin our jobs. Usually at On the Border or some other rape of all that is good and holy in the guise of a "restaurant."
But it's also the first real festival of spring where it's warm enough to hang outside, so it holds a special place in my tiny black heart, regardless.
So today, because the snow is starting to melt (I KNOW it's going to get ballscicle cold again next week, SHUT YOUR FACE AND QUIT HARSHING MY MOTHERFUCKING MELLOW) and I tend to get obsessive over new food, I'm making a big damn batch of pastor with homemade tortillas (you have Megan Stuke to thank for the latter, and you can find her immensely entertaining tutorial here, along with a recipe for queso fundido that has me kicking myself in the ass for not picking up some DAMNED POBLANOS while I was at the store. Shit.)
So. The pastor. The lovely delicious drool-inducing PORK. I don't care if it's the other maggot-infested purple HERPES meat, I'd still love me some pork.
First off, you need to make your marinade. (Disclaimer: I am not Mexican, more's the pity. I do not have a lifetime of experience cooking Mexican food. I don't even have a bitchy Mexican mother-in-law to tell me what I'm doing wrong (everything). So I am not claiming that this is anything even approximating an authentic pastor. It is, however, really really damn tasty, and even the most cracker-ass white girl (me) can make it at home.)
I went a little batshit, finaly having an excuse to buy up so many of my local Price Chopper's mind-boggling variety of dried chilis. Showing what I consider to be remarkable restraint (so remarkable that I rewarded my heroic act of self-denial by buying myself a pint of el Jimador on the way home), I limited myself to picking up only Guajillo, Arbol, and Ancho chilis. And a couple of cans of chipotles. In adobo sauce. Shut up.
As far as I'm concerned, you can use whatever damn chilis you want. I'm going for a sweet, smoky flavor with a little spice, but some people like to scream prayers while they poop. Who am I to judge? So I used probably four or five anchos, two or three guarillos, and two arbols, with maybe three chipotles thrown in because damn, I love their flavor. I tore the stems off, shook the seeds into the trash, and threw them into the food processor with some vinegar and lime juice, because the HELL if I'm going to spend all morning chopping peppers only to forget and rub my eyes and then spend the REST of the day contemplating suicide.
Since I'm using dried peppers, I scraped the resulting mess into a saucepan with the juice of one lime and one lemon, most of a Dos Equis (any lager will do, but I'm a sucker for themes), a shot of tequila because I wanted an excuse to open the bottle before 11 am, the juice from two cans of pineapple chunks, Mexican oregano, paprika, cumin, and two packets of Sazon brand Achiote (Note: if you use this achiote, do not panic if your poop turns an alarming shade of orange for a while. I don't know what's in it, exactly, that is such an efficient poo dye, but damn.) Simmer this whole mess until the dried peppers aren't so dry anymore, or about half an hour. Do not turn your back on the very curious and slightly evil toddler at this point, and for the love of all that's holy, DO NOT go to the bathroom while she has access to your stirring spoon. Um . . . I mean . . . haha, what? Move along, CPS, nothing to see here.
While it's simmering, you want to chop the hell out of some pork. You can use a tenderloin, a butt roast, (heh. BUTT!) or a big package of chop ends and centers that's been marked 50% off because it's probably going to spoil in two hours. I recommend the latter, because if there's any application in which you can get away with using almost-spoiled pork, it's in a dish that has a metric assload of spices and is also cooked for hours. This is why we invented spices and cooking with fire in the first place, right?
Chop it up into the thinnest, shreddiest bits you can. If you're using a roast, I recommend that you start cutting on it before it's all-the-way thawed. (What? You're not using a roast that came out of your deep freeze? What are you, a motherfucking Rockefeller? Tell your damned maid that meat is easier to cut up when it's kind of frozen. Damn.)
Then chop up a couple of cans of pineapple, mix that into the marinade, and smoosh the whole thing up with your by-now August-Underground-worthy pork. Cover that mess up with plastic wrap and stick it in the fridge for a minimum of four hours, but overnight is best.
The cooking is the easy part. You want a low, slow oven. I recommend no hotter than 250. Spread the sticky porky mess out in a pan, put a handful of pineapple slices over that, cover with foil, and roast it for a few hours. Add more beer if it starts to dry out.
If I have to explain to you how to use this to stuff tacos, or roll it up into enchiladas, or stick it between two slices of good bread and start throwing around the word "tortas" like you've ever even once been south of Oklahoma, they you're a worthless excuse for a human being and don't even deserve to eat this awesome food.
Events are conspiring in your favor, my friends. Yesterday was both the first time I've had the delicacy known as pastor, a sweet-and-spicy pineapple-marinaded slow-roasted pork, as well as the first warm-ish sunny day we've had in ninety-three million YEARS. It put me in mind of oh-so-Midwestern Cinco De Mayo celebrations, where all we pasty-assed Kansans congregate and consume way too much cheap tequila and bland burritos and bitch about them damn furrners takin our jobs. Usually at On the Border or some other rape of all that is good and holy in the guise of a "restaurant."
But it's also the first real festival of spring where it's warm enough to hang outside, so it holds a special place in my tiny black heart, regardless.
So today, because the snow is starting to melt (I KNOW it's going to get ballscicle cold again next week, SHUT YOUR FACE AND QUIT HARSHING MY MOTHERFUCKING MELLOW) and I tend to get obsessive over new food, I'm making a big damn batch of pastor with homemade tortillas (you have Megan Stuke to thank for the latter, and you can find her immensely entertaining tutorial here, along with a recipe for queso fundido that has me kicking myself in the ass for not picking up some DAMNED POBLANOS while I was at the store. Shit.)
So. The pastor. The lovely delicious drool-inducing PORK. I don't care if it's the other maggot-infested purple HERPES meat, I'd still love me some pork.
First off, you need to make your marinade. (Disclaimer: I am not Mexican, more's the pity. I do not have a lifetime of experience cooking Mexican food. I don't even have a bitchy Mexican mother-in-law to tell me what I'm doing wrong (everything). So I am not claiming that this is anything even approximating an authentic pastor. It is, however, really really damn tasty, and even the most cracker-ass white girl (me) can make it at home.)
I went a little batshit, finaly having an excuse to buy up so many of my local Price Chopper's mind-boggling variety of dried chilis. Showing what I consider to be remarkable restraint (so remarkable that I rewarded my heroic act of self-denial by buying myself a pint of el Jimador on the way home), I limited myself to picking up only Guajillo, Arbol, and Ancho chilis. And a couple of cans of chipotles. In adobo sauce. Shut up.
As far as I'm concerned, you can use whatever damn chilis you want. I'm going for a sweet, smoky flavor with a little spice, but some people like to scream prayers while they poop. Who am I to judge? So I used probably four or five anchos, two or three guarillos, and two arbols, with maybe three chipotles thrown in because damn, I love their flavor. I tore the stems off, shook the seeds into the trash, and threw them into the food processor with some vinegar and lime juice, because the HELL if I'm going to spend all morning chopping peppers only to forget and rub my eyes and then spend the REST of the day contemplating suicide.
Since I'm using dried peppers, I scraped the resulting mess into a saucepan with the juice of one lime and one lemon, most of a Dos Equis (any lager will do, but I'm a sucker for themes), a shot of tequila because I wanted an excuse to open the bottle before 11 am, the juice from two cans of pineapple chunks, Mexican oregano, paprika, cumin, and two packets of Sazon brand Achiote (Note: if you use this achiote, do not panic if your poop turns an alarming shade of orange for a while. I don't know what's in it, exactly, that is such an efficient poo dye, but damn.) Simmer this whole mess until the dried peppers aren't so dry anymore, or about half an hour. Do not turn your back on the very curious and slightly evil toddler at this point, and for the love of all that's holy, DO NOT go to the bathroom while she has access to your stirring spoon. Um . . . I mean . . . haha, what? Move along, CPS, nothing to see here.
While it's simmering, you want to chop the hell out of some pork. You can use a tenderloin, a butt roast, (heh. BUTT!) or a big package of chop ends and centers that's been marked 50% off because it's probably going to spoil in two hours. I recommend the latter, because if there's any application in which you can get away with using almost-spoiled pork, it's in a dish that has a metric assload of spices and is also cooked for hours. This is why we invented spices and cooking with fire in the first place, right?
Chop it up into the thinnest, shreddiest bits you can. If you're using a roast, I recommend that you start cutting on it before it's all-the-way thawed. (What? You're not using a roast that came out of your deep freeze? What are you, a motherfucking Rockefeller? Tell your damned maid that meat is easier to cut up when it's kind of frozen. Damn.)
Then chop up a couple of cans of pineapple, mix that into the marinade, and smoosh the whole thing up with your by-now August-Underground-worthy pork. Cover that mess up with plastic wrap and stick it in the fridge for a minimum of four hours, but overnight is best.
The cooking is the easy part. You want a low, slow oven. I recommend no hotter than 250. Spread the sticky porky mess out in a pan, put a handful of pineapple slices over that, cover with foil, and roast it for a few hours. Add more beer if it starts to dry out.
If I have to explain to you how to use this to stuff tacos, or roll it up into enchiladas, or stick it between two slices of good bread and start throwing around the word "tortas" like you've ever even once been south of Oklahoma, they you're a worthless excuse for a human being and don't even deserve to eat this awesome food.
The Process . . .
Cooking (with the exception of baking* and that fruity molecular gastronomy shit) is an ART, not a science. To train artists, they used to make them copy the works of The Masters until they no longer had to think in terms of color theory and composition, but their eyes and hands conspired happily no matter how drunk or fucked up from mercury poisoning they happened to be. You should think of recipes the same way, especially if you emulate me and go searching for recipes that call for half a cup of wine just so you have an excuse to open and then drink a bottle before 4 pm.
For one thing, the novice cook should choose her recipes wisely. If you're learning theory and technique from some asshat on AllRecipes.com who thinks I Can't Believe It's Not Butter! is an acceptable cooking fat, YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG.
Second, you need to keep in mind that you're only following a recipe so that you can get a feel for proportion and order of execution. Once you start skimming recipes to reassure yourself that you're not forgetting any little fiddly ingredient, once you start reading recipes and going, "oooh, this would be so much better with X," you're ready to stop knocking off the Mona Lisa and start composing original work.
Most of the time, I start craving something I've known how to make since I was seven, and just throw it together, and at some point I'll knock back a few doubles and write out a witty tutorial for all you pleebs. Others, I'll eat something that's just so utterly fabulous I can't stop obsessing until I've figured out how to make it myself, but better.
In the latter scenario, I'll spend an afternoon or two Googling recipes. The first results on the page are always for some bullshit from AllRecipes.com where Bertha from Salt Lake City says "Jambalaya is such a hassle to make, but here's my aunt's recipe for a jambalaya tater tot casserole!!! My sister-wives love this!!"
There's only one reason to ever, EVER click through to AllRecipes: to point and laugh. And maybe to troll the comments board.
Use common sense. If you're looking for a recipe for authentic pho, you probably don't want to waste your time with that link from QuickAndEasy.com. If you're brushing up on pan-fried chicken, SouthernCooking.net is most likely worth your time. If you really needed to read this paragraph, go look at porn or Oprah clips and get the fuck off my blog.
So I'll go through and find five or six awesome authentic recipes for whatever it is I'm trying to make. And I'll compare them; most of the time, aside from small deviations in proportions, they're nearly identical at the root. I'll make note of what ingredients are constant, what ingredients change, what methods I know from experience work well. I might find one recipe that calls for an impressive array of spices yet uses a MICROWAVE, FOR TIT'S SAKE in the cooking process, and another which sounds pretty bland in the seasoning department but has instructions for an interesting technique I've never screwed around with before.
After I've got all these different variations on the theme floating around in my head, I go all Dr. Frankenstein on that shit, and after I've tasted it and confirmed my highly-inflated opinion of my own genius, I send that tasty-ass monster shambling on down the Intertubes to you. You're welcome.
*Most baking, for most cooks. Some of us are just awesome, and can make shit up in ways that make the rest of you weep with envy. One of my temperamental muses, the lovely Bonnie Cherry, for instance, will get bored on a Thursday night and devise a recipe for some chocolate ganache-encrusted tidbit that, when shared, will elicit five marriage proposals and an offer of free rent. Myself, I can just throw flour and fat and salt at my pampered sourdough starter and come out with a loaf of bread that redefines the parameters of delicious. Most of you, though, need a mix and a recipe and a good hefty dose of angel magic to get a damned cake to rise, you poor bastards. So don't go screwing with baking recipes unless you've laid in a good supply of bulk flour and patience.
For one thing, the novice cook should choose her recipes wisely. If you're learning theory and technique from some asshat on AllRecipes.com who thinks I Can't Believe It's Not Butter! is an acceptable cooking fat, YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG.
Second, you need to keep in mind that you're only following a recipe so that you can get a feel for proportion and order of execution. Once you start skimming recipes to reassure yourself that you're not forgetting any little fiddly ingredient, once you start reading recipes and going, "oooh, this would be so much better with X," you're ready to stop knocking off the Mona Lisa and start composing original work.
Most of the time, I start craving something I've known how to make since I was seven, and just throw it together, and at some point I'll knock back a few doubles and write out a witty tutorial for all you pleebs. Others, I'll eat something that's just so utterly fabulous I can't stop obsessing until I've figured out how to make it myself, but better.
In the latter scenario, I'll spend an afternoon or two Googling recipes. The first results on the page are always for some bullshit from AllRecipes.com where Bertha from Salt Lake City says "Jambalaya is such a hassle to make, but here's my aunt's recipe for a jambalaya tater tot casserole!!! My sister-wives love this!!"
There's only one reason to ever, EVER click through to AllRecipes: to point and laugh. And maybe to troll the comments board.
Use common sense. If you're looking for a recipe for authentic pho, you probably don't want to waste your time with that link from QuickAndEasy.com. If you're brushing up on pan-fried chicken, SouthernCooking.net is most likely worth your time. If you really needed to read this paragraph, go look at porn or Oprah clips and get the fuck off my blog.
So I'll go through and find five or six awesome authentic recipes for whatever it is I'm trying to make. And I'll compare them; most of the time, aside from small deviations in proportions, they're nearly identical at the root. I'll make note of what ingredients are constant, what ingredients change, what methods I know from experience work well. I might find one recipe that calls for an impressive array of spices yet uses a MICROWAVE, FOR TIT'S SAKE in the cooking process, and another which sounds pretty bland in the seasoning department but has instructions for an interesting technique I've never screwed around with before.
After I've got all these different variations on the theme floating around in my head, I go all Dr. Frankenstein on that shit, and after I've tasted it and confirmed my highly-inflated opinion of my own genius, I send that tasty-ass monster shambling on down the Intertubes to you. You're welcome.
*Most baking, for most cooks. Some of us are just awesome, and can make shit up in ways that make the rest of you weep with envy. One of my temperamental muses, the lovely Bonnie Cherry, for instance, will get bored on a Thursday night and devise a recipe for some chocolate ganache-encrusted tidbit that, when shared, will elicit five marriage proposals and an offer of free rent. Myself, I can just throw flour and fat and salt at my pampered sourdough starter and come out with a loaf of bread that redefines the parameters of delicious. Most of you, though, need a mix and a recipe and a good hefty dose of angel magic to get a damned cake to rise, you poor bastards. So don't go screwing with baking recipes unless you've laid in a good supply of bulk flour and patience.
Friday, January 28, 2011
Listen. I love bacon as much as the next fat chick, but . . .
. . . you'll not find me posting links to "guy food" or "extreme cuisine" or even bacon-centric sites.
I do love me some bacon. I use it in a LOT of my recipes. And I love fat. If it comes from an animal and will conspire with my beloved bourbon to put me in an early grave, then by gods, my food is full of it.
But that's the thing. For my money, you have no business making chicken piccata without using AT LEAST a stick of butter. When that's your idea of a light pasta dish, then you just don't crave a three-pound quadruple-bacon cheeseburger. (A simple quarter-pound double will do.)
I saw a recipe a few weeks ago for some dude-food blogger's version of a "walking taco" (Frito pie if you're not some pansy-ass pasty-faced city boy whose momma probably fed him whole-grain bread. Please.) that called for multiple pounds of meat and A WHOLE GODDAMNED ROTISSERIE CHICKEN. This is just wrong on so many sad hipster levels .
First off, NOBODY EVER NEEDS THAT MUCH MEAT AT ONCE. Fucking KEVIN SMITH does not need that much meat at once, and I'm pretty sure that his entire creative process is fueled by pot, meat, and the pent-up man-boob sweat of a thousand adolescent nights spent wet-dreaming about female X-Men.
I know, it's about EXCESS, about how much you CAN eat, not how much you SHOULD eat. And here I blame a lifetime of being told that bland shitty food is a forbidden pleasure. Also the Food Network. When you combine fond childhood memories of Happy Meals snuck to you by Weekend Daddy with a constant barrage of OMFG LOOK AT THIS GUY EAT NINE POUNDS OF CORNED BEEF THIS IS TOTALLY WORTHY OF AIRTIME, you get these guys who think that stacking five Big Macs on top of half a dozen Egg McMuffins is the height of edginess. It's the Hot Topic T-shirt of rebellion cuisine.
Listen, posers. You can wrap your ground beef in ham and bacon up your sausage all you want. Some of us learned to cook with MOTHERFUCKING LARD and didn't even KNOW about this thing called "vegetable shortening" until we were in college. I'm betting you wouldn't have this obsession with ultra-fatty, ultra-meaty, ultra-MANLY food if you'd grown up with a can of bacon grease as a staple in your family fridge.
Tell the truth. Your mom made you eat organic bean sprouts, didn't she? Sometimes, late at night, when she'd had just a little too much Chablis and Ambien, she'd sneak into your room after your dad was asleep, silently pull down your comforter, and balance your chakras? It's okay. This is a safe place. You can say it. "My mom was a goddamned smelly hippie and I eat to fill the patchouli-scented hole she gouged out of my soul with her deodorant crystal THAT DIDN'T EVEN FUCKING WORK, MOM."
Interestingly enough, the American culture of fatty fatty boombalatty fried food is a Scottish import. Yup, back in the good old days when men were men, women wore crinolines, and dark-complected people sang rousing harmonies while being beaten like rented mules, the South was importing white trash from Scotland, and slaves and crackers alike were learning how to make damn near anything palatable through the judicious application of hot hot fat. And the idea that it maybe wasn't a good idea to bread and fry fucking EVERYTHING was laughable, because when you have two chicken livers and a piece of hog intestine to feed your family with, you kind of don't mind piling on the hunger-satiating fat and delicious fried calories.
So yeah, the next time you stand around with fried Twinkie crumbs in your ratty-ass ironic beard, you can thank the noble (ahem) Scots for your cuisine of choice. Not that they'll accept your gratitude, of course. You'll be lucky if they chuck a deep-fried sausage-coated egg at your face and mumble something completely unintelligible but still indicative of their conviction that your mother blows goats on her day off from the donkey show (these are the people who use the word "cunt" as a synonym for "person," after all,) but at least you can rest easy knowing that you've been all mannerly and shit. If you really want to show your gratitude, you can hook them up with some of the Percocet you've been prescribed to combat the crippling pain you're now suffering from that nasty case of diverticulitis resulting from the mind-rending constipation brought on by a steady diet of meat, meat, and lameness.
Fucking hipsters.
I do love me some bacon. I use it in a LOT of my recipes. And I love fat. If it comes from an animal and will conspire with my beloved bourbon to put me in an early grave, then by gods, my food is full of it.
But that's the thing. For my money, you have no business making chicken piccata without using AT LEAST a stick of butter. When that's your idea of a light pasta dish, then you just don't crave a three-pound quadruple-bacon cheeseburger. (A simple quarter-pound double will do.)
I saw a recipe a few weeks ago for some dude-food blogger's version of a "walking taco" (Frito pie if you're not some pansy-ass pasty-faced city boy whose momma probably fed him whole-grain bread. Please.) that called for multiple pounds of meat and A WHOLE GODDAMNED ROTISSERIE CHICKEN. This is just wrong on so many sad hipster levels .
First off, NOBODY EVER NEEDS THAT MUCH MEAT AT ONCE. Fucking KEVIN SMITH does not need that much meat at once, and I'm pretty sure that his entire creative process is fueled by pot, meat, and the pent-up man-boob sweat of a thousand adolescent nights spent wet-dreaming about female X-Men.
I know, it's about EXCESS, about how much you CAN eat, not how much you SHOULD eat. And here I blame a lifetime of being told that bland shitty food is a forbidden pleasure. Also the Food Network. When you combine fond childhood memories of Happy Meals snuck to you by Weekend Daddy with a constant barrage of OMFG LOOK AT THIS GUY EAT NINE POUNDS OF CORNED BEEF THIS IS TOTALLY WORTHY OF AIRTIME, you get these guys who think that stacking five Big Macs on top of half a dozen Egg McMuffins is the height of edginess. It's the Hot Topic T-shirt of rebellion cuisine.
Listen, posers. You can wrap your ground beef in ham and bacon up your sausage all you want. Some of us learned to cook with MOTHERFUCKING LARD and didn't even KNOW about this thing called "vegetable shortening" until we were in college. I'm betting you wouldn't have this obsession with ultra-fatty, ultra-meaty, ultra-MANLY food if you'd grown up with a can of bacon grease as a staple in your family fridge.
Tell the truth. Your mom made you eat organic bean sprouts, didn't she? Sometimes, late at night, when she'd had just a little too much Chablis and Ambien, she'd sneak into your room after your dad was asleep, silently pull down your comforter, and balance your chakras? It's okay. This is a safe place. You can say it. "My mom was a goddamned smelly hippie and I eat to fill the patchouli-scented hole she gouged out of my soul with her deodorant crystal THAT DIDN'T EVEN FUCKING WORK, MOM."
Interestingly enough, the American culture of fatty fatty boombalatty fried food is a Scottish import. Yup, back in the good old days when men were men, women wore crinolines, and dark-complected people sang rousing harmonies while being beaten like rented mules, the South was importing white trash from Scotland, and slaves and crackers alike were learning how to make damn near anything palatable through the judicious application of hot hot fat. And the idea that it maybe wasn't a good idea to bread and fry fucking EVERYTHING was laughable, because when you have two chicken livers and a piece of hog intestine to feed your family with, you kind of don't mind piling on the hunger-satiating fat and delicious fried calories.
So yeah, the next time you stand around with fried Twinkie crumbs in your ratty-ass ironic beard, you can thank the noble (ahem) Scots for your cuisine of choice. Not that they'll accept your gratitude, of course. You'll be lucky if they chuck a deep-fried sausage-coated egg at your face and mumble something completely unintelligible but still indicative of their conviction that your mother blows goats on her day off from the donkey show (these are the people who use the word "cunt" as a synonym for "person," after all,) but at least you can rest easy knowing that you've been all mannerly and shit. If you really want to show your gratitude, you can hook them up with some of the Percocet you've been prescribed to combat the crippling pain you're now suffering from that nasty case of diverticulitis resulting from the mind-rending constipation brought on by a steady diet of meat, meat, and lameness.
Fucking hipsters.
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